Which was possibly just as well, thought Richard. For if sailors’ language was normally considered salty, a Chinese sailor’s language could reach an entirely higher plane, as suited elevated exclusively Chinese inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom. The port authorities had already been described as foreign devils and the sons of rabbits — a peculiarly Chinese insult that he had never been able to understand — but things could only go downhill from there. Still, he thought, grasping at straws and looking for silver linings as always, at least the longshoremen had unloaded more than half the cargo. And what was left aboard effectively formed a flat, level deck — albeit one marked with black lines like the street plan of an American city — one container level below the gunwales. It was as though the main deck of one of his tankers had simply been pushed down by three metres. The tops of the containers formed a sort of gigantic, oblong Rubik’s cube that stretched from the port side to starboard, and from the foot of the rear-mounted bridge house to the square forecastle head. And every fifteen metres or so — two standard twenty-foot container lengths or one standard forty foot — stood a cell guide with a lashing bridge reaching up above it. The cell guides were effectively metre-wide walls reaching right across the ship, from the level of a notional main deck down to the bottom of the in-hull storage areas. These were designed to hold the containers securely in place while the ship was laden and safely at sea. There were walkways running along them from port to starboard at what would have been deck level — metre-wide passages running from side to side along the tops of the interior cell guides. Walkways deserted now, for there was nothing to be done until the docks started working properly again. Walkways which, when the ship was more fully laden, would anchor the metal lashing rods designed to reach across the ends of the container towers as they rose above deck level and hold them secure up to the top of their safe lading instructions, which was, of course, just below the square top of the vessel’s own container-handling gantry. But at the moment there was nothing piled there at all.
‘Then, if there’s nothing to be done, perhaps we should grab a bite to eat as well, Captain,’ he suggested mildly, suddenly aware that breakfast had not featured largely in this morning’s activities, and last night’s chateaubriand suddenly seemed an unsettlingly distant memory. Captain Sin was gave a deep sigh of ill-contained fury and led the way below.
Like her cargo, Sulu Queen’s cook was from Guangzhou. His speciality, therefore, was Cantonese cuisine. As Richard and the fuming Captain Sin settled into their chairs, they were confronted with a range of steamed and lightly stir-fried delicacies. Richard chose steamed dim sum dumplings, sweet-and-sour pork and steamed spare ribs with pickled plum and soy bean paste, stir-fried rice, Chinese broccoli and Brussels sprouts. It was a cuisine familiar to him from his recent trips to Hong Kong. Subtle, sweet and substantial — very different from the spicy Szechuan food he had enjoyed up in Shanghai. But he noticed that his pork, like Captain Sin’s beef, had been stir-fried rather than deep-fried; the coating of the pork nuggets was soggy rather than crispy, though tasty nonetheless.
‘I banned all deep-frying in the galley,’ explained Sin curtly when Richard commented. Talking about something other than the overwhelmed port officials — together with the calming effect of lunch — allowed Sin’s accent to return to the urbane American-tinted English he usually spoke. He leaned towards Richard earnestly. As he did so, the sun, just beginning to wester in the early afternoon, struck through a port hole powerfully enough to frame his round shoulders and basket-ball head. It shone through his protuberant ears, making them glow like pink stained glass. The effect was droll but a little disturbing, almost as though his rage was sending steam out of them — the comic-book cliché apparently coming to life. His words, however, were not funny at all. ‘The weather was too unsettled. Indeed, it is only now that we are in port that I allow stir-fries. When we were at sea we only ate boiled or steamed food.’ He unbent slightly, his round face losing a little of its hectic flush. ‘I have eaten sufficient steamed chicken to last several lifetimes. But I thought we were likely to face quite enough challenges without having the galley awash with boiling oil — or, more likely, bursting into flames. I like my spare ribs broiled, not my chefs. I had promised the cook and the crew that I would reinstall the deep-fat fryer and perhaps even allow deep-fat frying in the big wok if all went well here.’ His face clouded into a frown once more. ‘That simply adds to the frustration we all feel that things are not, in fact, going well. I believe some of my officers and crew would trade almost anything for a dish of salt-and-pepper shrimp or twice-fried crispy sweet-and-sour pork like their mothers used to make.’ He leaned back out of the light and his ears stopped glowing. But, like the top sections of his plump cheeks, they remained a hectic red.
Richard forced speculation about Sin’s face to the back of his mind, and thoughts about the food aboard his ship as well. For Sin’s words struck a chord. ‘So the passage over was rough?’ he asked with a frown. He knew better than most what it must have cost to confiscate a Cantonese chef’s deep-fat fryer. And forbidding him to fry in his wok was almost unheard of.
Captain Sin shook his head in a curt negative. ‘It was not as I expected — feared, rather. Or as the weather predictors threatened. It was …’ He leaned closer. ‘Like the Legend of Dschou Tschu, where the young man Dschou Tschu goes into the forest and the great grey ghost tiger stalks him. The tiger who is so powerful that his roaring becomes a terrible storm. A tai fun. It was as though we were little Dschou Tschu and the storm tiger was stalking us all the way over from the Fragrant Harbour …’
Richard’s lips twitched towards a smile of familiarity at the old Chinese name for Hong Kong, but then his lean face folded into a frown. Captain Sin was not a man given to sudden flights of fancy or extravagantly imaginative ideas. That, indeed, was part of his strength as a good, solid, utterly reliable commander. But the image of a storm tiger stalking Sulu Queen as she came east across the Pacific chimed all too vividly with what Dr Jones of NOAA had said about the impending ARkStorm, and with his own unsettled feelings every time he looked away westwards across the Pacific. He had a sudden, disorientatingly vivid mental image of Sin’s mythic beast, a monster, miles high, made of granite-coloured cloud banded with anthracite-black stripes, its rain-grey foreclaws brushing the ocean’s restless surface, its jaws a thousand miles wide and its eyes the yellow of lightning bolts, prowling out of the western Pacific and eastwards towards California, dragging a tail of destruction behind it that was longer than the jet stream. A sense of renewed urgency stabbed through him. Something deeper even than the wish of a businessman with possibly millions of dollars riding on getting Sulu Queen back on schedule. Suddenly he wanted his ship, his wife, his friends and himself well away from California — and as soon as humanly possible.